Go-Karts and Robots - SD60 students excel at innovation
Board members take EV go-karts for a spin
Prespatou, NPSS students show-off electric go-karts to board
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had at a board meeting,” School District 60 board of trustees chair Helen Gilbert said after she and other board members went for a spin in a pair of EV go-karts.
Students from Prespatou and North Peace Secondary School brought their electric go-karts to the board office Monday night for a demonstration following their May 25 trip to Merritt, BC for the Edison Motors High School Go-Kart Challenge held at the Merritt rodeo grounds.
British Columbia entrepreneur and inventor Chace Barber of Edison Motors sponsored the competition, sending 30 go-kart kits made up of axels, brakes and batteries to schools throughout Western Canada. The students who received the kits then had to design, fabricate and build their electric go-karts.
The School District 60 students rose to the challenge, once their kits arrived, they spent many hours designing, building and testing their go-karts.
At Prespatou, the go-kart building was an extra-curricular activity, and teacher William McColm said his go-kart group spent every lunchtime after spring break working on their go-kart. The project was led by two Grade 11 students, and two Grade 8 and Grade 9 students were trained to help with the welding.
McColm said his team spend a lot of time learning how to build a front end, as their project focussed on speed and agility.
Ian Zackodnik, who teaches metalwork at NPSS said his students involved in the project spent approximately 300 hours of class time working on their go-kart. Zackodnik’s students focussed on the off-road capabilities of their go-kart, making sure the kart had a roll cage with a good distance between the driver’s helmet and the cage.
Both karts go approximately 40 km/hr, although McColm said the first bench test of Prespatou’s engine clocked 67 km/hr.
Twenty schools turned out for the Merritt competition, with as many varied designs as there were schools. The competition consisted of four different events – barrel races, sled pull, off-roading and a speed course. The NPSS go-kart team took third place in the sled pull, while Prespatou’s go-kart won an innovative design award.
“It was a fun, carnival atmosphere and a great experience,” said McColm. “The boys enjoyed the heck out of themselves.”
Resiliency is key to success in robotics students learned
Participation in the national robotics competition has helped some local students solidify their career choices, while still in high school.
Grade 11 students Josh Coenders and Nolan Cote, along with Robotics and Physics teacher Brant Churchill spoke to the regular board of trustees meeting on Monday about their experiences with the program.
The robotics class began at North Peace Secondary School in 2015 as an extracurricular activity, before becoming a board approved curriculum class in 2016, and eventually a provincial curriculum class, Churchill said.
“Through the class, what we end up doing is a lot of building, a little bit of programming, 3D printer design, a lot of hands-on experiential learning,” he said. “One of the big things for the class is the idea of resiliency is super-key due to the fact that no matter what they do, it takes a long time. And then it more than likely will not work. So, we have to go, what can we do better, what needs changing and go from there. It’s a lot of just build and learn. Which is a really fun way of approaching things.”
The class has had a diverse range of students participate, from kids in the Evergreen program, to kids taking shop classes, to those who plan to go into engineering, Churchill said.
One former student who is a wedding photographer, also takes time to coach a robotics team in Edmonton, Churchill said.
From its start as an extracurricular activity, the NPSS robotics team has taken part in the Skills Canada competition each year, making it to Provincials seven times, and to Nationals four times, Churchill said. This year, the team placed fourth in VEX Robotics category, behind teams from Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Skills Canada is hosted in a different province each year, said Josh Coenders. The challenge is year is based on each province’s major industry, and this year since the team went to Quebec City, the challenge was designed around the maple syrup industry.
The arena was set up at the competition to simulate a maple grove, with PVC pipes for the trees and dowels inserted for the maple sap to come out. The “sap” was actually coloured balls, which the teams, with their robots, had to transport to various stations in their designated areas to earn points. Teams could also lose points if they knocked over obstacles such as small PVC pipes which represented saplings, Coenders explained.
Although the students used the same robots at Nationals as they did at the provincial competition, Cote said the underwent an evolution process. They’d started out with a team of robots that different tasks, but swapped to a more redundant and consistent platform, he said.
“I compare them to telehandlers,” Coenders said. “They have an arm on the back that pivots, it can rotate 90-110 degrees and then it can extend forward using a linear rail system, there are motors on the top of the arm that rotate gears that are attached to another part of the arm, so it extends to double its length and there’s a claw on the end, that also has a motor controlling what is essentially a wrist movement.”
The claw was created using the 3D printers at the school. Students also used the 3D printers to create hoppers to better enable the robots to transport the balls to their locations during the Skills Canada national competition.
There were two parts to the competition, the second part was the automated part, Coenders said. After winning provincials, the team was given a kit to take home, based on the Tetrix building system, which is different than the Bex system the students usually use. Coenders explained the difference as being similar to the difference between Lego and Duplo blocks, they’re the same principle just a little different.
With the Tetrix system, which is mostly used to make automated robots, you code them, press a button and they do their own thing either through sensors or manually telling them what to do, Coenders said.
“For that part of the competition, we figured out what we had to do the day of, and once we had gotten there, we could spend time between matches to build code and test robots,” he said.
The team got 100 percent on the automated part of the competition, which they felt was rather good considering that they’d only learned how to do the coding a month before. Fortunately, another former student stopped by the school before nationals and taught the team how to do the programming needed to run the Tetrix robot.
Trustee Thomas Whitton said, “its fantastic that you guys are getting the hands-on experience, programming and stuff can be challenging – what’s the number one thing that you learned?”
“Working together as a team,” Nolan Cote said.
“Friction between team members is a really big thing that can kind of screw you over,” said Coenders. “We worked extraordinarily well together, I think all the bases that we can individually cover, kind of fit perfectly well together. I do a lot of the programming, but when that doesn’t work, then Nolan has enough knowledge to help me solve problems and vice versa. With a lot of the building and designing we know just enough to compliment each of our abilities.”
Getting hands-on experience was another top item to come out of the pair’s robotics experience. Being able to take a robot from a design on a piece of paper to something that actually worked was great, Coenders said.
“You basically get the whole nine yards of experience,” Cote said. “You get hands-on, you get coding, teamwork. You kind of get everything.”
“It was relieving to see that we’re both quite proficient at that process, because this is somewhere that we want to take our careers,” Coenders said.
“Your passion really shows through,” Trustee Ida Campbell said. “It’s great to see education that you’re so engaged in.”